Glen, It's very possible, even likely, somebody has a set of cards with that RPG compiler in storage -- or perhaps moved to tape. Finding it will be the hard part, of course, but I have faith it's out there somewhere.
So who might have a Model 20 RPG compiler card set? Well, it'd have to be from somebody who had a 4K (or perhaps 8K or 12K) Model 20. Those with the larger memory configurations likely had at least TPS, not CPS. That number of CPS customers was undoubtedly in the thousands in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so that's good, and most of those customers probably had RPG. (Over 7,000 Model 20s were sold in the U.S. alone.) Then you'd probably focus on customers that have relatively stable business processes who are also still running RPG code, and that subset would be mostly found among today's IBM i customers, I'd imagine. RPG was much more popular in the System/3(X) machine line that evolved into the AS/400 and now today's IBM i, so most RPG-heavy customers would have followed that path, not the COBOL- and PL/I-heavy System/370 evolution. That subset of IBM i customers might have among them a "crazy" veteran or two who hung onto Model 20 cards. Or there's somebody knows there were card decks shipped off to a company archive or warehouse for safe keeping where they're still stored, just in case somebody had to fire up the Model 20 again or just because nobody wanted to take responsibility for tossing them. You might also approach this search from a "source" listing angle. Or a "What's the oldest file you've got?" sort of survey angle among IBM i customers, perhaps within IBM i user groups, to see if anybody just blindly pulled any sort of digital representation of that compiler forward into their backups. If somebody has the bits on tape -- read from cards during a long ago media migration, for example -- those bits could be repunched. You don't necessarily need an actual old card deck, though obviously that'd be a bonus for museum purposes. There might also be a few System/3(X) machines still doing productive work, and their owners might be former Model 20 owners -- and might still have the compiler lying around. I'd try that angle, too. As an aside, you've got a 16-bit general purpose computer with at least 4K of main memory (storage) and an extremely well documented instruction set. In principle there are certain current operating systems (and associated applications for those operating systems) that could be ported to a real System/360 Model 20. Here are a couple possible examples: http://www.femtoos.org http://www.freertos.org Atmel AVR32 microprocessors are big endian and have a "compact" (16-bit) instruction set, so that's helpful, though porting would still not be a *trivial* exercise. Good luck! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples IT Architect Executive, Industry Solutions, IBM z Systems, AP/GCG/MEA -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
